The exploding popularity and sophistication of the internet has brought to bear easy access for anyone or any entity to publish, consume and aggregate content. Along with an explosion of content, the rate of appearance of advertisements that accompany content (which advertisements also serve to monetize the content) is growing at a similar pace. Internet advertising supports a large and sophisticated ecosystem of participants including publishers, content providers, ad networks, ad agencies, ad aggregators, ad arbitragers, and social networking website operators.
Some of the participants are more technologically savvy than others, and understand the inner workings of an ad network. In contrast, some of the participants have more marketing savvy than others, but do not necessarily understand the inner workings of ad placement. Highly effective internet advertising demands high performance from the network as well as high performance (e.g. high performance in the form of clicks or conversions) from the population to which the advertisement is targeted. However, in some situations, especially in the context of online social networking websites, the effectiveness of advertisements cannot be comprehended solely on the basis of legacy measurement techniques.
For this and other reasons, what is needed are techniques for measuring the effects of social sharing on online content and advertising.